Strip Nude for Your Killer

You wouldn’t think that a movie with a title like Strip Nude for Your Killer would turn out to be among the sleazier, trashier, less redeemable Italian thrillers — or giallo — but what do you know! Strip Nude for Your Killer turns out to be among the sleazier, trashier, less redeemable Italian thrillers, and if you know anything about gialli, you know that sleaze, trash, and irredeemability are practically requisites for the genre. Strip Nude for Your Killer is also probably not the best film to use as a primer on the tropes and history of gialli, but at the same time, perhaps the fact that it slavishly caters to the lowest common denominator expectations of giallo films and never exhibits much in the way of style or ambition beyond fulfilling the base formula requirements make it the perfect, if not respectable, candidate for the following brief — and possibly wildly inaccurate in spots — history of what fans loving refer to giallo.

Giallo is, like pulp fiction in America, a loaded and often misrepresented concept that takes on various attributes and boundaries depending on who is doing the defining. Pulp, for example, was used to cover everything from romance to cowboy to crime to sci-fi and horror stories, though in time it became more specifically identified with crime and fantastic literature. And then, in the 90s, pulp started being used as a description of outrageous action cinema from the 70s, applied interchangeably with “cult film,” “drive-in movie,” and most recently, “grindhouse.” Pulp thus became an adaptive term, and even though it no longer meant what it used to mean, just as “drive-in movie” could have been any movie (I saw Jaws and Star Wars at the drive-in in the 70s, after all) but now has a very specific exploitation-oriented definition, “pulp” has an agreed-upon (more or less) pop culture definition that most people live with.

The history and evolution of giallo in Italy is very similar. Giallo originally referred to a series of pulp novels published by a company called Mondadori. The name “giallo” arose from the bright yellow covers that identified books as part of the series. As with American pulps of the same era (the first giallo was printed in 1929), the subject matter of giallo varied wildly, but in time they seemed to settle down into a steady pattern relying predominantly on murder mysteries, horror, and lurid tales of wanton sauciness. From time to time, the stories of well-established and well-respected mystery authors like Edgar Wallace and Agathie Christie showed up as part of the giallo series. Thus, like pulp, giallo became a much more specific phrase, irritating some (as does the abuse and rampant application of the descriptor “pulp”).

Making any claim regarding which film was “the first” of any type of film is pretty silly. No matter what you pick, someone is going to find an earlier film that fulfills the same basic requirements of whatever genre you’ve chosen, and then they’ll start claiming that movie was the first. Sort of like, “who was the first punk rocker,” a debate that includes everyone from Iggy Pop to Joey Ramone to the MC5 to Mozart. Or, to relate it to film, there’s the endless debate over “the first slasher film.” With “first” being nigh impossible to nail down, what becomes more important is the first film to act as a major cultural touchstone. So, while nailing down “the first slasher film” may be almost impossible, nailing down “the film that inspired the slasher movie boom of the 80s and defined the tropes of that trend” is much easier.

The exact same problem exists in determining “the first giallo movie.” Considering that Edgar Wallace and Agathie Christie books were part of the giallo series, you could reasonably argue that one of the movies based on those was the first giallo. What is more pertinent, again, and at least for our purposes here, is to define the film where the giallo trend really arrived, and the film that served as the template for the movies that would follow this trend. Regarding this, most people agree that it’s Mario Bava’s 1963 thriller The Girl Who Knew Too Much (which even features the lead character reading a giallo novel), with a major assist from Bava’s Blood and Black Lace in 1964. It is in these two movies that we see most of the “rules” of the genre established, sort of like how George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead certainly wasn’t the first zombie film, but it was the zombie film, and it set forth a template that is followed to this very day. Bava’s two early murder mysteries laid the foundation for what would come after them. And of course, just to dirty the martini further, from that start point forward, you can spend plenty of time endlessly debating which films are or are not gialli, or which films are or are not zombie films. So on and so forth. After all, us film nerds gotta debate something, and some of us are tired of arguing about whether or not Star Wars was awesome or sucked.

Bava’s two movies give us the framework and the common themes that define giallo: the unreliable eye witness and the general unreliability and subjectivity of observation, the international jet set flavor (including frequent use of American and British leads), the obsession with fashion and photography (another form of observation) and the industries that exist around each, prolonged and often fantastically complex murder sequences, highly stylized lighting and cinematography, and perhaps most famous of all, the black-gloved killer.

Giallo simmered through the 60s, but it was in 1970 that things really exploded. That year, a former scriptwriter and assistant director named Dario Argento made the film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Here, what started with Bava became crystal clear and fully realized. From 1970 on, the always zealous Italian exploitation market began cranking out all sorts of films that fit the giallo bill, more or less. Adding a dose of 1970s libertinism to the Bava formula, the giallo directors of the 70s were able to heap on more gore, nudity, and general sleaze. The films also showcased an increasingly cynical viewpoint of the morality of man, often featuring victim characters who were only marginally less rotten than the mysterious killer. Some of these films were incredibly good. Some wallowed in their own filth. A few were just plain awful, but most were enjoyable in a wild Grand Guignol fashion that demanded you abandon logic, accept often wildly improbably plot twists and resolutions, and concentrate instead on the imaginative style and outlandish setpieces. In other words, if you are going to be upset about disappointing revelations and idiotic, illogical behavior on behalf of the victims, giallo is not the genre for you to play in, and you will find little, even in the best films, that will convince you otherwise. These films take place in a world that appears similar to ours and involves characters who resemble humans, but ultimately, the world of the giallo film and the people who inhabit it resemble humans and the human world only superficially. Gialli operate under their own set of rules, and dealing with it can often be irritating — especially since that leads to the age-old battle over when something is an intentional artistic vision and when something is just incompetent crap.

In the case of Strip Nude for Your Killer, the debate is pretty one-sided. This movie is definitely incompetent crap. It’s largely unimaginative, always seedy and mean-spirited, and laughable in its attempt to build the central mystery. That said, it’s also horribly fun in a way you should be maybe just a little bit ashamed of, and it stars the queen of 70s giallo and one the most perfect and beautiful women to ever walk the planet, French Algerian actress Edwige Fenech.

To be fair, Strip Nude for Your Killer may be scummy, but it wastes no time letting you know exactly where you stand, as the first shot is a full frontal nude shot of a woman in a doctor’s office, legs up in medical stirrups, with a doctor’s face firmly planted between her legs. If this image — and keep in mind that it is quickly revealed she’s in the middle of an abortion — offends or insults you, then it’s best to just skip ahead to some other movie. I recommend Dario Argento’s Deep Red. It’s really good, and as far as gialli goes, it’s pretty clean. At least it doesn’t start off with a close-up of a chick getting an abortion. From this auspicious opening salvo, Strip Nude for Your Killer has the woman suffer a heart attack, causing the doctor and his pal to bring the woman back to her home and leave her in the bathtub in hopes that the police will just chalk it up to a heart attack without noticing the abortion thing.

From there, the film picks up at a photography studio staffed primarily by snide, condescending people who all seem to hate each other. Among them are star photographers Carlo (Nino Castelnuovo) and Magda (Edwige Fenech), who are involved with each other though Carlo is by no means a one-lady man. The other cast members all have names too, but there’s not much point in remembering them since, 1) they’re all basically the same character, and 2) they’re all going to die anyway. And sure enough, it doesn’t take too long before someone is stalking the employees of the studio and killing them off. Signature murders include the stabbing of a woman who, upon realizing a prowler may be in the house and all her co-workers are getting murdered, investigates while completely nude except for a pair of clunky platform clogs; and then there’s the one where, after charmingly attempting to rape a co-worker before going impotent, we get ample shots of an enormously fat man in his sagging tighty whities and black dress socks, clutching a deflated blow-up doll in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other while he cries uncontrollably. Tasteful!

Eventually, the cast is whittled down to a few potential suspects, including Carlo, Magda. Carlo and Magda take it upon themselves to investigate the murder, though it’s possible on of them is actually the culprit, and for some reason, any time they turn up a clue, they make a big fuss about how they couldn’t possibly go to the police with it, even though there’s no actual reason they couldn’t go to the police beyond the fact that the giallo film depends on the concept of the amateur sleuth, and writer-director Andrea Bianchi sort of blows at writing stories. When the killer is finally revealed…well it’s best for this movie and for many gialli to master the use of the phrase, “Oh, come on!” Strip Nude for Your Killer isn’t quite so bad as to have the killer be someone that hasn’t been in the movie until the point they are revealed to be the killer (“Why, it was his brother we’ve never seen all along!”), but it’s really close. And there’s plenty more “Oh, come on!” moments to keep your eyes rolling. Like the part where Magda goes to retrieve film from Carlo’s studio that presumably has pictures of the killer on it. While there, the lights go out, and Magda hears someone else sneaking around. So, knowing that everyone who works at your studio is being murdered, knowing that you have a piece of evidence that could reveal the killer, and knowing that the killer knows you have this and also knows where it is, when you are in this place, and the lights go out all of a sudden, do you instantly think, “Goodness, it is entirely likely this killer who has been stalking us has now arrived here!” Or do you think, “Aw, it must be a blown fuse!”

In fact, there are three distinct points at which you will need to master the use of “Oh, come on!” if you are ever going to get very far into the world of Italian murder mystery horror fun. The first is used pleadingly and comes when you engage in the following exchange with a friend:

And finally, there is the point at which you and your friend can finally agree on the proper application of the phrase. This comes at the end, when the killer is revealed to be someone you can’t even remember if they were in the movie before. It is here that you can both roll your eyes and exclaim, “Oh, come on!”

Strip Nude for Your Killer definitely requires a healthy sense of humor to get through. Director Andrea Bianchi does not possess the stylistic flourishes that make many other bad gialli worth watching even when their plots are of dubious merit. What Bianchi lacks in terms of inventive direction he attempts to make up for with sleaze, and at least on that level, he’s a Viking. Before you even start the movie, you can guess what sort of ride you’re in for. And while some titles may make lascivious promises the movie can’t keep, Strip Nude for Your Killer definitely is not one of them. I mean, here’s a film that plays a botched abortion for cheap titillation and ends with a joke about a guy strangling his girlfriend and sodomizing her against her will. Oh, the hilarity! In between, you get near frequent male and female nudity (often in the form of people you never wanted to see nude), plenty of slasher gore (usually in the form of the aftermath of a murder), and an all-around level of scumminess that becomes so thick it takes on the properties of camp excess. I’m sure John Waters would appreciate the ludicrousness of it all. It’s that gleeful willingness to reel about in the muck with such reckless disregard for even the most frayed threads of decent taste that keep Strip Nude for Your Killer from being offensive. It’s far too idiotic to be taken with that degree of seriousness. This movie is like stumbling upon a hobo jerking off behind a dumpster. Sure you can get offended, but honestly, what’s the point?

One of the fun things about gialli is that they actively invite psychoanalysis. Regardless of how shoddy and shallow the product may be, if it just follows the template close enough, it can piggyback on the psychological groundwork of Bava, who himself was nodding to Hitchcock. It’s like buying meaning wholesale, or shopping at Hot Topic instead of making your own punk clothes. For example, I have no doubt that Bianchi had absolutely nothing to say with Strip Nude for Your Killer. He wanted to make a sleazy murder mystery and get Edwige Fenech naked as often as possible, plus show a fat guy in saggy underpants. And that’s exactly what he did. But because, by 1975, so many gialli had been made and the cliches of the genre were so well established, he didn’t have to put any thought at all into having things us film nerds could pick up on in our never-ending quest to artistically justify even the basest and greediest of crap. Strip Nude for Your Killer is rife with the standard giallo themes, the most obvious of which is the deceptive nature of observation. You could even justify the tasteless opening by saying that Bianchi is intentionally duping the audience into thinking they’re getting a bit of cheesecake right off the bat, only to spoil it by introducing a dramatic and tragic revelation regarding the nature of the nudity we are observing. You would, I think, be full of shit if you did this, but it’s still fun.

Later in the film, the roll of film with the killer’s identity is brought into play, under the assumption that a photograph of a murder in progress is irrefutable proof. Once again, however, very little is what it appears to be. Edwige spends much of the movie poring over photographs of the victim, an old magnifying glass plastered to her face as a visual homage to the dime store detective novels from which the giallo film grew (and also as a fine example of how magnifying glasses aren’t designed work). In Strip Nude for Your Killer as in many other far superior gialli (specifically Dario Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red), the protagonist spends a great deal of time examining and re-examining something that seems perfectly clear but is later revealed to hold a significance no one recognized. Bird with the Crystal Plumage is one of the most obvious indictments of the notion of eye witness, but Deep Red is my favorite for playing off the lead actor, David Hemmings, and his role as a photographer obsessed with the grainy, minute detail of a photo in Anonioni’s Blow Up. In the case of Strip Nude for Your Killer, Bianchi is obviously just copying what he’s seen before, but it’s still kind of fun and one of the reasons bad gialli are often still enjoyable to dissect.

Bianchi is no stranger to sleazy thrillers. His filmography includes Cry of the Prostitute, The Malicious Whore, and Burial Ground, infamous for casting an obviously older midget as a child, and then having him bite off his mom’s breast while she lovingly breast-feeds him. I ain’t talking no Harry Earles looking guy, either, where you could almost believe the illusion that he was a little kid (still way too old to be breast feeding though, at least off his mom). No, this was more like a cross between Dustin Hoffman and Chris Kattan. Anyway, Bianchi isn’t much of a director, and whatever style exists in Strip Nude for Your Killer is most likely the product of Bianchi aping those who came before. The direction is competent and professional, but not much else.

Of course, for most viewers, there is one big reason, at least above the simple blanket “because it’s Italian giallo,” to watch Strip Nude for Your Killer, and that’s the appearance, usually nude or in little more than panties and an unbuttoned men’s dress shirt, of Edwige Fenech. Fenech was a staple of both Italian sex comedies and the giallo film, and she brought to the game a wicked combination of actual acting talent, comedic timing, a willingness to drop her robe for pretty much no reason, and some of the most devastating good looks I’ve ever seen. She split her time evenly between exceptionally great gialli like All the Colors of the Dark and other films with director Sergio Martino, and dodgy nonsense like this and The Case of the Bloody Iris. She was always game, though, and never looked to be half-assing it, even when her primary role was to show half her ass. In Strip Nude for Your Killer, she’s about as close as you’re going to get to a likable character, even though she’s kind of condescending and nasty to people. But when you’re surrounded by the likes of mean-spirited S&M lesbians, a guy who thinks anal rape is hilarious, a fat crying guy who also thinks rape is the way to a woman’s heart, and someone who is killing a bunch of people — well, it’s not hard to look like the good guy.

If you are looking for a good and proper introduction to the world of Italian murder mysteries, Strip Nude for Your Killer is not your movie. You want to be watching Deep Red or Blood and Black Lace or All the Colors of the Dark. Still, if you are already prepared for the peculiarities of sloppy Italian filmmaking, Strip Nude for Your Killer is surprisingly enjoyable. Even though it’s poorly written, even though it’s relentlessly tasteless (actually, because it’s relentlessly tasteless), even though it has very few points you could single out as being good other than Edwige, and even though it’s packed full of gratuitously seedy garbage (once again, what I mean is because it’s packed full of gratuitous, seedy garbage), it ultimately comes across as harmless.

I think it’s because you never get an opportunity to take the thing seriously for even a minute. Compare it to, for instance, Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper, a film that is marginally less sleazy, almost as absurd, but a whole lot meaner. The hatred for mankind is palpable in that film, and if you make it through to the end, all you really want to do is take a shower. Conversely, Strip Nude for Your Killer comes across as little more than a bunch of drunk Italians wanting to make a movie with a lot of nudity in it. If you go to the shower after watching it, you’re doing something, but it’s not because you feel grimy and depressed. Sure, the film is mean, but it never seems serious about it or committed to its misanthropy. This could just be my perception as a horribly twisted and dark individual, but Strip Nude for Your Killer just doesn’t have that visceral kick you would need to really be offended. It was preposterous anyway, and I was having too much fun reveling in the filth alongside it to worry about the many faults.

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4 thoughts on “Strip Nude for Your Killer”

Thanks for the review, Keith! Being a huge Edwige fan I was sorta debating whether to buy Strip Nude on dvd. I think I’ll save my money for the ridiculously expensive Your Vice Is a Locked Room and I have the Key. What do you think was Edwige’s best giallo, and did you see Hostel 2?

I believe awesome Femi Benussi is in Strip Nude for Your Killer too. I’d recommend her jungle girl flick Tarzana as a good candidate for the Teleport City treatment. I’m about to watch Edwige in Ubalda, All Naked and Warm.

“You could even justify the tasteless opening by saying that Bianchi is intentionally duping the audience … You would, I think, be full of shit if you did this, but it’s still fun.”For the record, I think there are probably some actually valuable scholarly things to say about even this film, though I doubt many of them involve Bianchi’s creativity as a director.Anyway, nice review. I rarely like gialli that much, but I’m tempted to pick this one up after that treatment. (Even Argento’s films are mostly interesting to me because of the visuals… but maybe I should revisit some and give them another chance.)